Quotes About Probability

If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?

So that was it. Aunt Ada Doom was mad. You would expect, by all the laws of probability, to find a mad grandmother at Cold Comfort Farm, and for once the laws of probability had not done you down and a mad grandmother there was.

There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

We can never achieve absolute truth but we can live hopefully by a system of calculated probabilities.

An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom--it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

When you have eliminated the impossible, what is left, no matter how unlikely, is the truth.

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.

At times truth may not seem probable. [Fr., Le vrai peut quelquefois n'etre pas vraisemblable.]

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

When you hear hoof beats, think horses before you think zebras.

The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.

Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths." He

And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It's very hard to believe.

theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions

We need to work hard to fend off our natural tendency to view what happened as having been inevitable. Our minds simply want to explain what happened and close the case, but the world followed but one path among many possible ones. If we do the Rain Dance and it rains, then to the human brain, it looks like the dance caused the rain. In the more rational part of our brain, we know it's not true. Yet we dance on.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor.

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]